Because if we're going to try and stop the misuse of our favorite comics and their protagonists by the companies that write and publish them, we've got to see what both the printed and online comics news is doing wrong. This blog focuses on both the good and the bad, the newspaper media and the online websites. Unabashedly. Unapologetically. Scanning the media for what's being done right and what's being done wrong.

Thursday, May 24, 2018

A new remake of Thundercats looks horrific

There's supposed to be a new cartoon coming based on the famous Thundercats franchise of the 80s called Thundercats Roar. But the artwork alone is a serious giveaway that it was deliberately dumbed down with very poor notions of character design that look like childish scribbles in a notebook. The producer sugarcoats everything thus:

“I think the world that they built lends itself really well to comedy because of how silly and crazy and outlandish those ideas are and some of those settings are,” says producer Victor Courtright in the exclusive behind-the-scenes video above. “But at the same time, it wouldn’t be ThunderCats if it didn’t have super cool action elements because that’s what people came back to. It’s very much something that we want to lean on. So with the new show, we’re not walking away from the action in any bit. Every step we take towards comedy, we take two more towards really cool action scenes and explosions and lasers and actions effects.”

Here’s the official logline for the series: “Staying true to the premise of the original series, Lion-O and the ThunderCats — Tygra, Panthro, Cheetara, Wilykat, and Wilykit — barely escape the sudden destruction of their home world, Thundera, only to crash land on the mysterious and exotic planet of Third Earth. Lion-O, the newly appointed Lord of the ThunderCats, attempts to lead the team as they make this planet their new home. A bizarre host of creatures and villains stand in their way, including the evil Mumm-Ra, Third Earth’s wicked ruler who will let nothing, including the ThunderCats, stop his tyrannical reign over the planet.”

But not staying true to the character designs of the original, which were far better and more competent. Who does this mule-brain think he is anyway? And it's not the only one - from what I know, there are at least a few more cheapie cartoons airing on Cartoon Network like Teen Titans Go that use this otherwise unimpressive style that reduces everybody to caricatures. Even the SD Gundam anime miniseries have better character design than this.

But maybe the biggest difference between the promotional poster and the older artwork is that the ThunderCats work as a team. In the promotional poster, they appear to be all out for themselves and no one is actually working together to achieve a goal. That looks like a red flag to me.

What really concerns me is the actual introduction to the character in that promotional trailer. Like the artwork and animation, the dialogue feels cheap. They don’t seem to be taking the character seriously and in fact, the character is acting like Deadpool by directly talking to the audience and breaking the fourth wall. He then refers to the mystical Sword of Omens as his “magic slicing stick.” Talk about completely erasing the history and significance of the sword.

The producers can lie all they want, but they're not fans of the original stuff.

Instigated by ThunderCats Roar, the upcoming Cartoon Network reboot of the classic 1980s sword-and-sorcery cartoon featuring feline humanoid aliens, a number of fans took to Twitter to gripe about the artistic style of the series by targeting a handful of alma maters. One school in particular, the California Institute of the Arts, was in the hot seat, as fans complained about how this newer, more humorous take on ThunderCats was drawn not in the muscle-rippling, “realistic” style of the original show but, rather, in something they derisively called “CalArts Style.”

Hmm, I take issue with their use of "realistic". These are the same kind of propagandists who demand "realism" according to their beliefs in how it should be portrayed. But when the fans they're against uphold what they think is realistic illustrations, they're suddenly against it. What a bunch of phonies these SJWs can truly be.

What's really odd is that several years ago, there was an attempt to revive the franchise with another series in 2011 that used more Japanese-style character designs (the 80s cartoon was also developed in Japan), which Forbes mentioned in their take on the subject, where the writer stated:

So when I see the vociferous reaction to the simplified and somewhat goofy art style and tone in ThunderCats Roar I can understand why fans feel this way. It’s not about taking ThunderCats seriously or anything like that but purely down to the artistic approach being used here, after all the original series was often humorous and silly.

And that's why using such a cheap, simplistic approach to art is moot and trivial. What the animators of this new rendition are doing practically gives animation in America a bad name, making US animators and artists look like they have no sense of style and aren't willing to take challenges in any way.

At the very least, maybe what the producers should've done was promote it as a parody of the original, but promotion clearly isn't a strong suit of theirs either. They've done a serious disfavor to art as much as to the fandom that's out there, and certainly won't be tuning in to see this waste of shoestring resources that could've been used to finance a documentary about animation instead.

About me

I'm Avi Green

From Jerusalem, Israel

I was born in Pennsylvania in 1974, and moved to Israel in 1983. I also enjoyed reading a lot of comics when I was young, the first being Fantastic Four. I maintain a strong belief in the public's right to knowledge and accuracy in facts. I like to think of myself as a conservative-style version of Clark Kent. I don't expect to be perfect at the job, but I do my best.